The ATI 9100 IGP

Originally the Radeon 9100 IGP was only certified to run at 400MHz and 533 MHz FSB, but after extending its cross licensing agreement with Intel, the ATI 9100 IGP acquired the 800 MHz FSB capability which is necessary to compete with Intel's own i865G integrated chipset. It also recognizes Hyper-Threading in the Pentium 4 CPU.

The ATI 9100 IGP core logic is manufactured on TSMC's mature 0.15-micron process (like their R300 class videocards), and like Intel's i865/i875P chipsets, the RADEON 9100 IGP utilizes a 128-bit DDR memory bus split between two 64-bit channels.

Its memory bus is capable of delivering up to 6.4GB per second of throughput using DDR400 modules, of which only two can be installed. In order to realize the platform's 4GB memory ceiling, you'll have to employ more conservative memory timings.

The integrated graphics core if the Radeon 9100IGP is similar to ATI's RADEON 9200 discrete card. But because the IGP must conform to certain size and thermal restrictions, ATI has stripped it down to a degree. The 9100 IGP features two pixel pipelines instead of four. Further, the hardware-based transform and lighting engine has been extracted from the core in favor of a software algorithm that off loads vertex calculations to the host processor.

ATI claim that there is a minimal performance penalty, and considering the power of modern Pentium 4 processors, there are more than enough computational resources to handle the job, at least at 3 GHz.

The IXP 150 Southbridge

ATi currently have three variations of the IXP southbridge; the IXP250, IXP200 and IXP150. The IXP250 in all fairness is actually a notebook Southbridge as the only difference between it and the IXP200 are power saving features. The IXP150 lacks the on board ethernet MAC, but that's not important considering the Asus P4R800-V has an onboard Gigabit ethernet NIC.